Home › Puddings and Dessert Sauces › Boiled Salad Dressing
Boiled Salad Dressing
1 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 1 teaspoon mustard 2½ tablespoons flour 2 teaspoons sugar Yolks 2 eggs or 1 egg cup milk 2 tablespoons melted buttercup vinegar Mix the dry ingredients, add the egg yolks, slightly beaten, butter, milk and vinegar, slowly. Cook in double boiler until mixture thickens. and vinegar, slowly. Cook in double boiler until mixture thickens.
Cool before using. If cooked too long, it will curdle. 1-21-81-8
A cooked, flour-thickened salad dressing of the sort that stood in for mayonnaise in most American kitchens before bottled dressings. It is a stirred custard with vinegar and mustard in it, and it behaves like one.
- The hinge: gentle heat, and stop earlyA yolk-thickened mixture like this will break somewhere around 180F, and the acid speeds the separation along; the flour gives it some protection but not much. Keep the water below a simmer, stir constantly, and pull the pan once the mixture coats the spoon and holds a line drawn through it.
- Ambiguous measurementsThe milk and vinegar quantities have lost their fractions in this printing. Comparable boiled dressings of the period use about 1 cup milk and 1/4 cup vinegar to 2 tablespoons flour and 2 yolks, but the original figures here cannot be recovered with certainty.
- Mustard"1 teaspoon mustard" means dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. Prepared mustard adds its own vinegar and salt and will thin the dressing.
- Double boilerAny heatproof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water works, so long as the bowl does not touch the water. Direct heat on a modern burner will set the yolks in streaks before the flour has cooked out.
- Cook the flour outTwo tablespoons of flour benefits from a short spell of held heat once thickening begins, or the finished dressing can taste pasty; but the recipe's own warning that overcooking curdles it sets the limit, so keep the water well under a simmer.
- If it curdlesThe recipe warns of this without a remedy. A dressing that has just broken can often be smoothed by pushing it through a fine sieve or blitzing briefly once cool; badly scrambled yolks cannot be rescued.
- Yield and keepingThe yield depends on the missing milk and vinegar quantities, so it cannot be given exactly. Cover and refrigerate; use within three or four days, and expect it to thicken further as it chills.
Boiled dressing predates the mayonnaise most cooks now buy, and for good reason: an emulsion of oil and raw yolk was fussy to make by hand, while a flour-and-egg dressing cooked over water was stable, cheap, and used milk instead of a cupful of expensive salad oil. Dressings of this type were the standard accompaniment to potato salad, cabbage slaw and cold meats in American and British household cookery from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Its tang comes from vinegar and dry mustard rather than lemon, and the sugar is there to round off the acid, not to sweeten. The tradition is often said to live on in the sweet-sour slaw dressings of the Midwest and in Pennsylvania Dutch cooking.